Making Lemonade – The Turn Around

Hello RTV. We all know that every once in awhile we’re going to run into a realtor that gives us a hard time based on the price of our virtual tours. These same people are probably selling million dollar homes and driving around in a 60K vehicle, but drive you nuts about a one to two hundred dollar marketing tool. What’s up with that? Well remember folks, people buy based on EMOTION. Let’s talk about a technique that Jim Blue uses to turn the tables on them.

One thing that Jim likes to do at a realtors office is ask these same people what other forms of advertising they’re doing. Most of them will always point to print forms of advertising. When they do Jim has an open door to show them how much money they are throwing away on these other forms of advertisement. It’s simple math at this point. Jim points out that classified ads cost A LOT on a per-day breakdown (like usually $100 for 3 days of local advertising), then he breaks it down to cost per day vs. cost per day for 365 days of internet worldwide exposure. When he’s done with that part he pulls up a hit report for one of our elegant looking HD 360 virtual tours and shows the traffic report. When this is up on the screen Jim asks them how many showings the ad brought in and also points out how nice it is to send this hit report to the seller each week. At this point the realtor begins thinking and scratching their head a bit.

Jim then goes back to the HD virtual tour and points out that 360 virtual tours can also work as excellent lead generators for realtors. “Wow honey look at what Joe Realtor did for the Smith’s house down the road! Look at how amazing these photos are! Maybe we should call up Joe” When is the last time you ever heard of someone looking at a classified ad and saying, “Wow! Now that’s an awesome marketing tool!” Jim tells them that for the cost of one three day classified ad he can market their property on hundreds of websites until the listing has sold. With the help of our Exposure Engine of course!

Most of the time the turn-around comes when Jim asks them if their using any real estate books. Many of them state that they are and admit to paying around $200-$500 per full color page ad. Here is where you point out again that the virtual tour never expires, while the book will have a shelf-life of a month or so depending on publication and area. NAR pointed out last year that nearly everyone is starting their search online so why on earth would you put the majority of your marketing efforts per home offline? You’ll find that if you show these realtors how they can use their marketing dollars MORE WISELY to appeal to more buyers in all phases of the active ‘shopping process’ you will turn these price gripers into good lifetime customers. After all…they just want to save precious marketing dollars!